Ljs: Guardian First Film award: The Arbor

Clio Barnard's distinctive documentary on playwright Andrea Dunbar, using verbatim theatre techniques, is the 2010 winner

The conclave is over, the white smoke has appeared ? and we can tell you that the winner of the 2010 Guardian First Film award is ? The Arbor, directed by Clio Barnard. As last year, two films quickly became frontrunners in the judging meeting: The Arbor, the distinctively textured documentary about playwright Andrea Dunbar, and its polar opposite on our shortlist, Monsters, the effects-laden sci-fi parable by Gareth Edwards. Both films, in the judges' view, were brilliant, but The Arbor it was that squeaked home .

One of our judges, Peter Bradshaw described it as an "experimentalist docudrama close to genius", while another, actor Saffron Burrows, said it was "utterly unique and devastating". A third judge, last year's winner Gideon Koppel, of Sleep Furiously renown, called The Arbor "a remarkable and moving portrait that ? unusually ? describes the internal landscape of a character." That last accolade must be particularly satisfying for Barnard, as she admits to being a big fan of Koppel's film ? "It's wonderful to be in the same company as [previous winners] Unrelated and Sleep Furiously," she says.

The Arbor is a small-scale, intensely personal affair. Barnard says she didn't even expect a cinema release. "It was originally meant to be for TV. When the UK Film Council got involved, they insisted it had a theatrical release. All the great reviews helped, too. In retrospect, a big part of it was the subject matter: it's about inter-generational neglect, and how it's important to understand it. I realise now there was a need for this sort of story."

The Arbor's ostensible subject, Andrea Dunbar, is best known to filmgoers as the writer of Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, the rambunctious mid-80s farce directed by Alan Clarke. But she made her mark some years before, after her first play (also called The Arbor) was staged at the Royal Court theatre in 1980. Dunbar grew up on, and wrote about, the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford; the rough life she experienced there provided her with her identity as a writer, but clearly consumed her too ? she died aged 29 after collapsing in a local pub. But her oldest daughter, Lorraine, emerges from the film as an equally conflicted figure, herself submerged in a drug-dependent existence; in 2007, she was jailed after being convicted of manslaughter in the death of her two-year-old son.

Barnard says her starting point for the film was a desire to revisit Buttershaw "for the third time"; that is, after Dunbar's play, and then Robin Soans' A State Affair, staged at the Soho theatre in 2000, which first took the idea of "verbatim theatre" back to Dunbar's old haunts. Barnard elaborated the idea behind verbatim theatre ? using participants' actual words ? into a cinematic technique where screen actors lip-synch to documentary audio recordings; we hear Lorraine's voice, but see actor Manjinder Virk mouthing her words. It's a device not without a touch of controversy ? there was some questioning of The Arbor's documentary credentials when it had an award-winning premiere at the Tribeca film festival, back in April 2010.

But Barnard says that's the point. "I don't mind what people call it, it's meant to provoke. Part of the rationale was to show how truth is unstable, that true documentary will always fail. It's always shaped in some way. My own view is, because of the archive material and the audio recordings, its more of a documentary than a fiction film. But the blurring between the two is deliberate."

The Arbor, apart from anything else, displays the continuing strength of the "artist film" in British cinema; despite the acclaim for her film, Barnard is unlikely to be heading for Hollywood any time soon ("I'm thinking about going back to Buttershaw, there were so many things that I thought were interesting but couldn't fit in"). But she laughs off any suggestion that she is following in the footsteps of the likes of Steve McQueen, the director of Hunger. "You know, I'm not an established artist like him. In some ways I was overwhelmed by the reaction to this, it's on a completely different scale to anything I've done before."

Andrew Pulver

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